we wake, bright and early, too early! pack up, and roll up to the pod gates, i collect the tickets and vehicle pass. IT SAYS ‘RACER’ on it! that must be me !!!! we cruise through the site and pick a place in the pits. coffee then spanners out, boiler suit and gloves on and take a deep breath and start dropping the engine again….lots of people have offered to help but it’s not really what you go to a show for, to help other people take greasy engines out of old buses, now is it ? — after lots of uhmming and ahing i get the engine out and pull the tinware off, oilcooler etc… i change the seals, pedestal and oilcooler… again… lots of people wonder by throughout the day with help, coffee and advice. paul from T3D had team AMR courier up a type4 gearbox end/engine test rig so, much against my better judgement, i rig it all up and with help from paul and derek j fire up the engine sat on the ground behind the bus. a trail of cables and fuel pipes leading into the bus like it was the umbilical cords from some freakish mechanical seacow foetus….

after i got over the fear it turned to be quite a laugh, revving the guts out of a howling, half stripped down engine while it wanders about on the floor, glistening with viscous gunk, looking for a heating duct to scuttle into like the lickle thing from alien. sweet.
well, the judgement was that the oil leak looked cured so in goes the engine double quick time, scrape the grease off, run down and try and get a run on the track before they finish the run what you brung at 5pm. i try and explain what i’m trying to do as i sling t-shirts, stickers, pots, pans, bananas and tapecassettes out of the bus in the general direction of our pit area. other racers don’t have this problem !
Bad luck ! they’re finished the signing on for the day and i can’t race… feeling bad i sneak the bus into the end of the line up and run anyway.

sat in the queue i have no idea what the bus will run, it ran a 19.01 last year. it was running badly then and with various recent mods it should be low 18s.. ah well, we’ll see. anyway there are no other buses here only race cars so no one will notice if i run a disasterous time. ha ha ha!

as i get ready a very clean looking 11 window bus rolls up in the other lane. cool, thinks i. (as long as i beat him)

we pre-stage, then stage then yellow, yellow, yellow, green. I hit a red light and foul. i launch the bus off the line, it response sounding like a ducati in a blender, acceptable loud and we start rushing toward the end of the strip, only to have trhe 11 window bus streak past and dissapear into the distance. i run a 20 seconds something and find out that steve jenkinson, owner of the heavily modified, nitrous injected type 4 motored bus ran a 16… humiliation. his bus is shiny too!

i’ve got more windows though!